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Page 7
Moreover the ease with which the scenes are altered allows us not only
to hurry on to ever new spots, but to be at the same time in two or
three places. The scenes become intertwined. We see the soldier on the
battlefield, and his beloved one at home, in such steady alternation
that we are simultaneously here and there. We see the man speaking into
the telephone in New York and at the same time the woman who receives
his message in Washington. It is no difficulty at all for the photoplay
to have the two alternate a score of times in the few minutes of the
long distance conversation.
But with the quick change of background the photoartists also gained a
rapidity of motion which leaves actual men behind. He needs only to turn
the crank of the apparatus more quickly and the whole rhythm of the
performance can be brought to a speed which may strikingly aid the
farcical humor of the scene. And from here it was only a step to the
performance of actions which could not be carried out in nature at all.
At first this idea was made serviceable to rather rough comic effects.
The policeman climbed up the solid stone front of a high building. The
camera man had no difficulty in securing the effects, as it was only
necessary to have the actor creep over a flat picture of the building
spread on the floor. Every day brought us new tricks. We see how the
magician breaks one egg after another and takes out of each egg a little
fairy and puts one after another on his hand where they begin to dance a
minuet. No theater could ever try to match such wonders, but for the
camera they are not difficult; the little dancers were simply at a much
further distance from the camera and therefore appeared in their
Lilliputian size. Rich artistic effects have been secured, and while on
the stage every fairy play is clumsy and hardly able to create an
illusion, in the film we really see the man transformed into a beast and
the flower into a girl. There is no limit to the trick pictures which
the skill of the experts invent. The divers jump, feet first, out of
the water to the springboard. It looks magical, and yet the camera man
has simply to reverse his film and to run it from the end to the
beginning of the action. Every dream becomes real, uncanny ghosts appear
from nothing and disappear into nothing, mermaids swim through the waves
and little elves climb out of the Easter lilies.
As the crank of the camera which takes the pictures can be stopped at
any moment and the turning renewed only after some complete change has
been made on the stage any substitution can be carried out without the
public knowing of the break in the events. We see a man walking to the
edge of a steep rock, leaving no doubt that it is a real person, and
then by a slip he is hurled down into the abyss below. The film does not
indicate that at the instant before the fall the camera has been stopped
and the actor replaced by a stuffed dummy which begins to tumble when
the movement of the film is started again. But not only dummies of the
same size can be introduced. A little model brought quite near to the
camera may take the place of the large real object at a far distance. We
see at first the real big ship and can convince ourselves of its
reality by seeing actual men climbing up the rigging. But when it comes
to the final shipwreck, the movement of the film is stopped and the
camera brought near to a little tank where a miniature model of the ship
takes up the r�le of the original and explodes and really sinks to its
two-feet-deep watery grave.
While, through this power to make impossible actions possible, unheard
of effects could be reached, all still remained in the outer framework
of the stage. The photoplay showed a performance, however rapid or
unusual, as it would go on in the outer world. An entirely new
perspective was opened when the managers of the film play introduced the
"close-up" and similar new methods. As every friend of the film knows,
the close-up is a scheme by which a particular part of the picture,
perhaps only the face of the hero or his hand or only a ring on his
finger, is greatly enlarged and replaces for an instant the whole stage.
Even the most wonderful creations, the great historical plays where
thousands fill the battlefields or the most fantastic caprices where
fairies fly over the stage, could perhaps be performed in a theater,
but this close-up leaves all stagecraft behind. Suddenly we see not
Booth himself as he seeks to assassinate the president, but only his
hand holding the revolver and the play of his excited fingers filling
the whole field of vision. We no longer see at his desk the banker who
opens the telegram, but the opened telegraphic message itself takes his
place on the screen for a few seconds, and we read it over his shoulder.
It is not necessary to enumerate still more changes which the
development of the art of the film has brought since the days of the
kinetoscope. The use of natural backgrounds, the rapid change of scenes,
the intertwining of the actions in different scenes, the changes of the
rhythms of action, the passing through physically impossible
experiences, the linking of disconnected movements, the realization of
supernatural effects, the gigantic enlargement of small details: these
may be sufficient as characteristic illustrations of the essential
trend. They show that the progress of the photoplay did not lead to a
more and more perfect photographic reproduction of the theater stage,
but led away from the theater altogether. Superficial impressions
suggest the opposite and still leave the esthetically careless observer
in the belief that the photoplay is a cheap substitute for the real
drama, a theater performance as good or as bad as a photographic
reproduction allows. But this traditional idea has become utterly
untrue. _The art of the photoplay has developed so many new features of
its own, features which have not even any similarity to the technique of
the stage that the question arises: is it not really a new art which
long since left behind the mere film reproduction of the theater and
which ought to be acknowledged in its own esthetic independence?_ This
right to independent recognition has so far been ignored. Practically
everybody who judged the photoplays from the esthetic point of view
remained at the old comparison between the film and the graphophone. The
photoplay is still something which simply imitates the true art of the
drama on the stage. May it not be, on the contrary, that it does not
imitate or replace anything, but is in itself an art as different from
that of the theater as the painter's art is different from that of the
sculptor? And may it not be high time, in the interest of theory and of
practice, to examine the esthetic conditions which would give
independent rights to the new art? If this is really the situation, it
must be a truly fascinating problem, as it would give the chance to
watch the art in its first unfolding. A new esthetic cocoon is broken;
where will the butterfly's wings carry him?
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